4 Material und Umwelt
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At the end of the sixteenth century, a number of relics and artefacts were discovered in Granada, Spain. They included what became known as the Lead Books of the Sacromonte, twenty-one written artefacts made of circular lead leaves engraved in archaic Arabic characters. The authorship was attributed to some Arab disciples of St James the Greater considered to be the first evangelisers of the Iberian Peninsula. The texts, the materiality and the circumstances of the discoveries fuelled a debate surrounding their authenticity that lasted more than two centuries, a debate so fierce and controversial that not even papal condemnation in 1682 was able to stop it. Soon after the discoveries were made public, scholars highlighted the many contradictions and errors of a historical, linguistic and theological nature present in the texts, identifying members of the local Morisco community as possible forgers. This article focuses on how the scholarly community of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries handled these findings and looks at the methods employed by the scholars to evaluate the authenticity of the artefacts. It will also look at how the particular interests of the various authorities involved influenced the acceptance or dismissal of relevant academic results.
In the last decade, applications of X-rays to the study of manuscripts significantly spread in both diversity and extent. They range from writing material analysis, mostly with X-ray fluorescence (XRF), permitting non-invasive characterization of inks and pigments used, to the investigation of the origin of writing supports. In addition, XRF mapping has proved to be an invaluable tool for recovering erased text. Finally, computed-tomography (CT) has shown potential in virtually unrolling rolls, making text readable without using-damaging mechanical methods. Despite their growing use, little attention has been paid to the side effects of such analytical tools. We observed irreversible parchment colour changes during some experiments on dead-sea scrolls with synchrotron radiation sources. Furthermore, partial photo-reduction of iron under high intensity beam during X-ray absorption near edge structure spectroscopy (XANES) measurements of iron-gall ink on paper has been reported several times [5,6]. Such phenomena have mostly been overlooked so far, although there is an increasing awareness of the necessity to study them. We conducted experiments at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) facilities to investigate X-ray induced structural alteration of paper and parchment to see whether the presence of absorption centres (ink and pigments) has an impact. In addition to better understanding degradation processes, we are aiming to define an appropriate methodology of analysis of manuscripts with a tolerable risk of damage. The first results concerning X-ray induced damage of cellulose materials have already been presented at the Synchrotron Radiation and Neutrons in Art and Archaeology (SR2A). We are focusing here on the results on parchment materials.
While studying the socio-geographic history of inks, division 4.5 (Analysis of cultural artefacts and assets) of the BAM (Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung) in Berlin together with the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures in Hamburg has developed a protocol for ink analysis. It consists of a primary screening to determine the type of the ink, and a subsequent in-depth analysis using several spectroscopic techniques.
Using this protocol, scientists can assist scholars in addressing a rather broad range of historical questions that cannot be answered unequivocally through scholarly research alone. Among these are investigations on collaboration between scribes and scriptoria, on the usage and annotation of manuscripts and on their path through time and space in general. This research can thus help to reconstruct the circumstances of the production of written heritage as well as their history and transmission.
To facilitate the dialogue between the scholars and the scientists a simple optical tool was developed to allow the scholars to perform preliminary ink analysis required for formulation of the question that in turn can be answered by scientific in-depth investigations. In this paper, ink types and their identification method is accompanied by examples of the recent work conducted on parchment manuscripts in the Austrian National Library.